Previously

Artemis nervously shuffled her way down Republic Street, a prominent, commercial avenue, pushing her way through thick crowds. Before leaving, she had compiled a list of grocery items and medications to obtain with the help of Tosha and Vasilisa. It was her personal belief that they were letting Alexey sleep in too long, but in his case, she knew his meds already by heart. Sofia had no contributions to make to either list, although Artemis was planning on purchasing a doubled amount of Alexey’s meds, just in case he ended up having to share them with Sofia. She would figure out the chirality issue later, although luckily Alexey’s lithium didn’t need reversing. She planned to buy caraway seeds to test whether chirality was even a concern, but was preparing for disappointment.

Her left hand was buried in her coat pocket, clutching a metal figurine of a woman like one might clutch a concealed pistol. This was an apt analogy, for its only use was to escalate fights and to intimidate her enemies, not as a first resort for self defense. Artemis was interested in stealth, anyhow, not fighting. It just didn’t hurt to have a backup plan. A thin loop of string around her neck was tied to another figurine inside her coat, this one of stone and shaped like a hedgehog. This idol was the true powerhouse behind the operation, and made Artemis’s current concealment possible.

Before Artemis had left, she had anointed both idols with her blood. “It’s not necessary,” Sofia had said, “But it can’t hurt.” Her hypothesis was that a small meal of Artemis’s blood would endear the idols to her for a short time. This was not a normal way to feed an idol, but the Ryzhayas were a different breed.

Artemis stopped at an intersection and looked at the signage, frustrated. She couldn’t remember where this intersection was located on Republic Street relative to the store, and resented it. She felt small, afraid, and like a failure. “A little fear is good,” Sofia had told her. “That’s the idol working. You have to let it work. Embrace its effect. Otherwise you can’t use it.”

She picked a direction and kept pushing.

An hour ago, Sofia was explaining the basics of disease spirit idols to Artemis and Vasilisa.

“The way it works is, once you bottle the disease, you can release it at will. That part’s obvious,” she said in a lecturing tone, which had Alexey been awake, would have reminded him uncomfortably of his mother. “But what does releasing the disease mean? You don’t just give people its symptoms. You recreate the conditions under which the disease took place. A CO poisoning spirit won’t just poison people, it’ll create actual carbon monoxide. A flu spirit will smell like the breath of a sick person. A spirit of a broken bone can be used to apply great forces and break things.”

“So… we want a disease… where… people tend to feel its effects when other people lose track of them,” said Vasilisa.

“Exactly,” beamed Sofia. “You want to guess what that might be?”

“Um,” began Artemis hesitantly, “Like… a bad sense of direction?”

“That might work, but probably not any better than evading them on your own would,” said Sofia. “Not that we have a ‘bad sense of direction’ spirit to begin with. But you’re on the right track. What disease makes you hidden?”

“Getting HIV or leprosy means nobody wants to talk to you,” said Vasilisa ruefully.

“But it also calls attention to you. Come on, you’ve almost got it,” insisted Sofia. “What disease makes you violently reject attention?”

“Social anxiety?” asked Artemis. “No, wait, better than that, agoraphobia?”

Sofia clapped her hands, startling Alexey awake. “Exactly! Red star! I’ve got just the idol,” she said, getting up and beckoning to the girls to follow. “It’s this whole syndrome of social anxiety and a fear of crowds. The poor guy we got it from was a hermit. We only got it, what, three years ago? Anyway, it’s in the study, where all the newer idols are. I’ll take you.”

Alexey, still half-asleep, became curious. “You guys are doing idols?” he mumbled sleepily.

“Uh, yeah,” replied Artemis.

“Why?”

“I’m making a food and meds run.”

“Oh. Good luck.” He turned over. “Don’t hurt ‘em too bad. They’re just dumb kids.” He drifted back off to sleep.

Artemis felt that this wasn’t giving her ethics and kind nature enough credit, but was somewhat relieved by Alexey’s singular vote of confidence in her martial abilities, and by the time she’d thought of something to say in return, Alexey was back asleep.

“You coming?” asked Vasilisa.

“Uh… yeah. Coming.”

Artemis did not know what the crowds looked like to an onlooker. Supposedly she was hidden in them without there being any visible sign she was using an idol. Was she just easy to glance over? Or actually invisible?

She bumped into a featureless man in business clothes. “Hey, watch it, asshole,” he said, his voice sounding uncannily dead, almost sarcastic. Artemis paled. She did not want to be here. “I’m so sorry,” she said, panicked. “I didn’t mean to, sorry.” But he was already gone.

As one who’s normally not had much trouble with social interactions, this was a new experience for Artemis. Had she not been under the influence of the idol, she would have just given him a middle finger and moved on. Maybe dismissed him with a clever insult. The disease, however, turned all attention on her into a burning, carcinogenic spotlight, and it was all she could do to not double over and vomit from radiation poisoning if it went on for more than a few seconds. She had steeled herself for the whole experience in advance, and bore the burden with some pride, as she remained firm in her decision to leave rather than sending Vasilisa in her stead. But privately, inwardly, she could complain as much as she wanted. And she was not having a good time.

Her first stop was a small mom-and-pop pharmacy off of Republic Street. Pharmacies in Russia didn’t typically ask for prescriptions, even for medications that were mandated by law as prescription-only, but Artemis was already very worried about the possibility. She had no plan for what to do in the case that they did ask, other than to conduct an armed robbery by means of the metal idol she was still clutching. It was true that it had never happened before in her entire past lifetime, but maybe the anxiety hedgehog (the phrase she had taken to thinking of the hedgehog idol by) would make the pharmacist unnaturally hostile to her like it did the phantoms in the crowd.

Artemis entered the pharmacy. She had a hard time telling through the phantom crowd, but its thirty or so square meters of bare wooden floor seemed deserted of customers, as usual. The original, idly judgemental Artemis not completely suppressed by the idol, she wondered how the pharmacy stayed in business.

The phantoms seemed to be trying to stand in line at the counter, completely unheeded by the cashier. Artemis decided that she shouldn’t feel remorseful pushing them out of the way so that she might take her turn.

“Um, hi, uh, excuse me?” she asked the pharmacist, muscling aside two phantoms. “Fuck off, wait your turn!” the one closer to the front of the line admonished, with the same deadened tone as the others had used.

The pharmacist looked up. “…good day? What can I do for you, sir?”

The last word drove a stake through Artemis’s heart. What more could she possibly do to appear female? She was unwilling to compromise her pageboy haircut or her leather jacket and pants, but her voice and body contours should have been enough for anyone. It sometimes felt as though her remaining masculinity was located in the spirit world, and nothing short of an exorcism would stop people from detecting it. Idol or no idol, this was one of Artemis’s worst vulnerabilities, and the reopening of the wound destroyed her already fragile concentration. She tried to piece it back together.

“Uh, um, hold on, let me get my list… I mean I’m picking up for family, so it’s a lot…”

She frantically rooted around in the inside pockets of her coat and found a page.

“Oh… this is my grocery list… sorry, hold on, just one more moment.” In retrospect, it seemed stupid to have two separate pages, but that was how the lists had gotten made. Artemis knew they must be in the same pocket…

“Hurry up, asshole! First you cut the line, then you hold up the line? I hope you get cancer and die, you piece of shit,” yelled one of the phantoms from the back of the line. Artemis tried desperately to remind herself that it wasn’t real, but failed to completely shrug off the insult. Her already frantic search became manic.

“I… I-I can’t f-find it, I’m so sorry, I knew it was here somewhere…” Then she noticed the grocery list she was holding was actually made of two pages. “Wait! I’ve got it! Uh, I need lithium citrate, sertraline, bupropion, escitalopram, mirtazapine, lamotrigine, injectable estradiol valerate, injectable testosterone, bicalutamide, needles… uh, do you have all those? I can give the dosages and gauges, and, uh, amounts.”

The cashier stared at her.

“Sir… this is the bakery. The pharmacy is next door.”

Meanwhile, Vasilisa was poking around in the Shchavel House study, eyeing works such as a small sheaf of papers stapled together titled “Unicorn, Mammoth, Whale: mythological and etymological connections of zoonyms in North and East Asia” in English, by one Juha Janhunen, or a leather-bound volume of yellowed pages with a glossy inset, titled The Dubrovka collection: Northern spirits writ in birchbark, by Yuvan Shestalov.

“So… if I wanted to learn magic, where would I start?” she asked Sofia.

“You should probably start with Metamorphoses,” said Sofia, fetching a pile of typewritten papers, bound with bulldog clips, from the bookshelf that bore works written by the Ryzhayas themselves. The letters were faded, and it was rich with proof-reading marks and hand-drawn glyphs in much more vibrant blue ink.

“Like… the Latin thing?”

“No, it was written by a Ryzhaya. The first Ryzhaya, actually. It’s, like, the Ryzhaya instruction manual. It’s about binding disease spirits, and taming abominations, told in the form of an autobiographical song. Not that anyone remembers the melody.”

“…the Latin thing was written by a Ryzhaya?”

“This isn’t the same text! They just have the same name! I mean, I think the Latin one is somewhere around here, too. Hopefully on the classical Western literature shelf. If you care.”

“Not really.”

“Good. Anyway, so, Ryzhaya’s words (or I think she was called Marsymyaku) were originally sung in really archaic Nganasan, but this version has translations and annotations in Old Komi by her great-granddaughter H”andula”amyaku, so you should get out the translators for both… shoot, I never explained this, but we have spirits we trained to translate stuff, I’ll show you. I think it was H”andula”amyaku’s idea to call it Metamorphoses, by the way. I’m not sure she knew that that was already a thing.”

“Okay. Um. Why is it called Metamorphoses if there’s nothing about shapeshifting in it?”

“It’s about turning diseases into advantages. How is that not a metamorphosis?”

“Okay… I guess.”

Sofia detected more than a little disappointment. “Look, if you want to read about shapeshifting, we have whole shelves of books on that. The one my mom made me read was…” She strode across the room to the section of recently published grimoires. She selected a relatively thin hardcover textbook, bound in purple gloss and poor typography, the cardboard on its corners visibly frayed. It had a fanciful painting of a jellyfish on the front, in various stages of its lifecycle. “This. The mind that seeks to replace itself, by Maria Szegedy. I think it was published only about four years ago.”

“That’s kind of a dramatic title for a textbook.”

Sofia shrugged, trying not to dwell on uncomfortable memories. “Yeah, the author was a bit… weird. Like a fifth of the book is just her going on about how shapeshifting reveals something deep about our souls, or whatever. You can just skip those parts, they’re not important.”

Vasilisa snorted. “If I wrote that book, fully half of it would be metaphysical wanking. I’m reading all of it.”

“Well, it’s your choice. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. But yeah, before you get into it, you should read Metamorphoses first. It’s a lot shorter, and covers a lot more basic stuff.”

Vasilisa nodded. “Work before play.” She looked at the shapeshifting textbook and frowned. “This is in English.”

“We have a translator for that, too. Though I’ve never needed it. My mom taught me English.”

“Nice. …wait, does that mean Alexey knows English, too? I should ask him about it.”

This seemed to Sofia a good opening to ask a few questions about her alternate self. She had been too polite to express it thus far, but she was intensely curious about Alexey. How would she have turned out, had she been born a boy? It was something she had already thought about long ago, years before she’d learned of Alexey’s existence. She supposed that spending a childhood groomed to be the heiress to a powerful and restrictive family legacy naturally made one wonder about the alternatives.

“So, Alexey, he… when did you meet him?” asked Sofia.

Vasilisa glanced at her. “Like, two years ago? No, wait, wow, three. We met at Purtov House. The, um, homeless—”

“Yes, I’m familiar with the Purtovs. You stayed there?”

“Well… no. We met in the parking lot, actually, when applying to stay. They wouldn’t let me in, on account of… uh… they thought I was a gay man, and the Purtovs don’t… yeah. They didn’t let Alexey in, either, because of his self-harm scars. They would have let Artemis in, but she didn’t want to leave Alexey, and Tosha didn’t even apply but I didn’t want to leave him, so, the four of us decided to live together. First off of Artemis’s savings, but then me and Alexey got jobs.”

“…what job did Alexey get?” Sofia suddenly realized that being overtly more interested in Alexey might be a mistake. “Sorry, I mean, tell me about yourself, too, I’m just curious about Alexey because, you know…”

“I get it,” said Vasilisa. “You’re, like, a princess or something, and you wanna know what you could have been instead of a princess, right? Well, Alexey got a job as a bookbinder. And I got a job as a telephone operator. He got fired after a couple months for showing up late too much. Me and Artemis have been trying to find him jobs ever since then, but nothing really clicked. I quit the telephone gig only like a month ago, ‘cause I was fed up with getting yelled at all day. I have a nice gig lined up at Purtov House as a sauna operator. A guy I made friends with while I was homeless works there now, and he said he’s sure he could get me a job there.”

Vasilisa noticed Sofia’s eyes wandering. “But, uh… I guess that’s all pretty boring, ‘cause it doesn’t involve Alexey much, right? Sorry, uh, lemme think… he—”

“No, it’s okay,” interrupted Sofia. “I understand. Getting a job isn’t simple. And holding one isn’t either. I was mistaken to think that Alexey might be defined by his social status like I am.”

“Yeah,” admitted Vasilisa. “That’s a pretty elegant way of putting it. You know, I dunno what Alexey’s deal is. What his, like, goals are in life. I mean, we don’t all have to have ‘em, but… a lot of days, he wouldn’t even leave his room. He didn’t… read and write all day, like me…” She felt a pang of regret at the loss of her life’s writings, and a new flare of indignation at Tosha’s dismissal of her feelings last night. “I know he used to pray a lot. And, well… cut. But I think he stopped doing both of those this year. Where was he? Was he sleeping?”

Sofia frowned. Vasilisa was obviously expecting her to provide some insight here, but she didn’t have too many memories of free time, either. The most familiar form of free time to her was hours stolen out of the night to secretly lie awake in bed instead of sleeping, contemplating fantasies of a more pleasant existence, or sometimes ruminating on her failures. Some nights, she’d spend hours crying instead of sleeping, wishing that she were someone, somewhere else.

“I… have no idea,” said Sofia. “Maybe we could ask him when he wakes up?”

“Sure, I guess,” replied Vasilisa, unconvinced.

A silence followed.

“I’m just gonna keep reading here, if you don’t mind,” said Vasilisa. “Is it okay if I use the study desk? That chair looks comfy,” she said, pointing to the expansive gray reindeer leather armchair behind the desk.

Sofia smiled. “That’s the Ryzhaya throne, if there ever was one. Sure, go ahead. The translator idols are in the desk drawers. They should all be labelled. The ones in the bottom drawer aren’t fully trained yet, and the one for Classical Mayan doesn’t work at all.”

“…why is there even a translator idol for that here?” asked Vasilisa, barely knowing who the Mayans even were.

“My grandmother, Anna Vasilyevna, had a small obsession with American civilizations,” explained Sofia. “If we look at her part of the Ryzhaya bookshelf… yup, here we go. The Codex Tezcatlipoca,” she said, unfurling a poster with some vaguely circular scribbles on it.

“This is a Mayan book?” asked Vasilisa in wonder.

Sofia snorted. “Hardly. If I remember correctly, it’s an Aztec calendar, or something. Except she got a spirit to copy it out of a library in Austria, and spirits are awful at drawing. Look at that thing,” she said, pointing to a misshapen nub on a humanoid figure. “That’s supposed to be a hand.”

Vasilisa grew a little concerned. “Is there, like, a book here on what spirits can and can’t do? I don’t really get why they can do all this supernatural crap but then they fuck up something like drawing hands. Is Artemis safe? From the spirits she’s carrying?”

Sofia considered for several long seconds. “Well… how about this: read Metamorphoses, okay? Then, if you have any questions about how spirits work, come to me and I’ll try to answer them. I wouldn’t have sent Artemis out there with those spirits if I didn’t think it was safe. And I think she’s probably doing perfectly fine right now. After all, she seems to me a very strong person, and the anxiety spirit she’s carrying isn’t very harmful. And if anything does go wrong, don’t forget, the mosquitos will tell us.”

Vasilisa nodded hesitantly.

Through great effort, Artemis eventually managed to correctly locate the pharmacy, and retrieve every item on her list of medications. She was unreasonably relieved because of this, and had grown slightly more tolerant of the crowd. She no longer had to worry about being asked to present a prescription, or the pharmacy being out of something she or one of her friends needed to live. Now all she needed to do was go buy some kitchen supplies and bulk groceries at Eurosmak, and who had ever heard of a wholesale warehouse store being out of rice?

Unlike the pharmacy, Eurosmak was located directly on Republic Street, and its sheer size and distinctive cobalt blue paint job made it impossible to miss. It was a box constructed out of corrugated steel, a hallmark of newer buildings that sprang up as Keleykh slowly industrialized. The actual owner of the warehouse probably lived in a rich western city such as Moscow or Tsaritsyn, but the local manager was, miserably, paying goodwill fees to three separate factions in Keleykh just to keep his job, one of them being the Sump. He had been ordered to be on the lookout for a boy with a lot of dark hair and a lot of leather, calling himself “Artemis”, in addition to a number of other young adults.

In fact, the manager knew Artemis very well, as she’d been making food runs for the matchbox house for the better part of two years now, always from his store. He secretly hoped that Artemis would never show up. He hadn’t had many conversations with her; the most drawn out one had been their first ever meeting, in which he explained to her the virtues of being an Old Believer as he helped her bring groceries to her car, to which Artemis had asked polite questions to show she was listening. Privately, he liked to imagine that he’d made an impression on her, and had passed some of his self on to the next generation. Artemis, on her part, had forgotten the details of the conversation, but had appreciated the man for being friendly towards and unafraid of her, early into her transition, and always greeted him warmly thereafter. The man knew that the Sump’s request meant that Artemis was in a great deal of trouble with them, but he also knew they had mysterious, magical ways of finding out whether he’d been obedient, and was unwilling to go so far as to sacrifice himself or his livelihood for the sake of a girl who was, ultimately, not a close friend or relative of his.

As a result of the Sump’s mandate, he currently sat on a stool a ways behind the cash desk, watching each customer in turn as they interacted with the lone cashier. He could have done the job himself, but the cashier was already here, so why bother? He enjoyed watching each person, imagining what they might be making with the food they bought, and what their life might be like based on the clothes they wore. The lady he was watching wore a luxurious brown mink stole, and was buying large quantities of salmon roe, fresh fish, and seaweed, in addition to a bottle of soy sauce. A socialite, planning a Japanese-themed dinner, maybe? They would need rice for it, but perhaps they already had that at home.

The next customer… he frowned. The next customer was wearing black leather, and definitely had dark hair, but they were mostly blocked from view by the cashier. He craned his neck a little to see, but the customer was shifting around nervously, seemingly shrinking as they stammered something or other to the cashier. The manager hopped off his stool to get a better look, but just at that moment, the customer dropped some of their coins on the floor, and bent down to pick them up, hiding themselves from view entirely. Not wanting to be caught staring at a customer, the manager sat back onto his stool. By the time he focussed his attention back on the counter, the customer had already gone.

Artemis hauled a bag of rice out the doorway of Eurosmak in two outstretched arms, a number of other basic products perched on top of it, including a heavy, rectangular Chinese vegetable knife for good measure. Her heart was pounding, but she was buoyed by the fact that she had successfully gotten everything she needed without any major obstacles, and was on the quickest and simplest way home, back up Republic Street, with only a single final left turn to bring her to Shtchavel House. She only needed to keep going forward.

She strode forth confidently, directly into a woman who was, by all appearances, very real.

“Hey, Sofia?” asked Vasilisa. She’d come downstairs from the study to find Alexey, Tosha, and Sofia huddled around the fire together, making small talk.

“Mm-hmm? What is it?”

“Can Artemis turn the idol off? Like, if the disease’s effects are getting too bad? Because I’ve been reading the Metamorphoses, and it doesn’t mention it anywhere.”

“Well, no, of course not. These spirits aren’t machines, they’re like… trained animals. Like dogs. Can you turn a herding dog off?”

“Oh… I see. So what do you do if it starts overwhelming you?”

“You get someone else to help you with it.”

“Oh.”

Artemis sat on the curb, trying very hard but failing to catch her breath. Her face was buried in her arms, so that none would see it. She wanted to disappear, she wanted to not be perceived, she wanted to not exist. Not like this. She thought about every flaw in her presentation, every bit of her that was coded more masculine than feminine. Individual little protrusions of bone and cartilage, third-decimal-place deviations in her body measurements, a lack of makeup or traditionally feminine clothing, every breath she took that flowed past a larynx which wasn’t shaped right… it was all on the table and it was all made of things she desperately didn’t want to expose to the world right now. Maybe if she just sat here long enough, all the people would go away and nobody would have to see her and then she’d go home…

She kept sitting.


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